Monday, 24 April 2017

all our relations

I'm exhausted: two back-to-back intensive retreat weeks on the Isle of Iona, 630 miles' drive back home in a day, then hitting the ground at a gallop to try and scoop up all the undone and very overdue work immediately. In the last 12 days I've had little sleep. This means that the last thing I feel like on a Bank Holiday Monday, after just one day off, is another workshop.But as soon as the 15 participants arrive and join the circle of chairs in our sunny and currently-unusually-neat courtyard, everything changes. I'm alert, excited, and delighted to be offering, once again, the work about which I'm so passionate: finding a way that words might help us explore, re-vision and express the experience of our connectedness with – well, All That Is.And we begin with the silence of the singing bowl, and then a gentle attention to the many ways in which the world insinuates itself into our beings through the senses.Immediately I drop into a calm, still, wakeful place from which I can give my best.

It's at this point that the tamest of the four local robins, who's been perching in the hydrangea immediately behind my head, skims my shoulder and lands on the boot of one of the participants. This seems to settle an extra grace on our work.'All Our Relations' is an outdoor workshop; my favourite kind. I'm offering it to celebrate 10 years of Transition Town Totnes (the TT movement began here). TM and I are fortunate enough as to be custodians to 2 acres of meadow, apple orchard, deciduous woodland and a big veg garden, plus some little herb and soft fruit beds (I say 'fortunate', but much of this is down to his building and planting before I arrived in his life).Today, I'm guiding these people in a deepening of their felt and imaginal experience of the land and the rest of the natural world in this secluded spot, where buzzards tilt, hare leap, roe deer graze, a fox appears from time to time, and nuthatches and sometimes woodpeckers come to my call at the feeders.When I originally conceived this workshop, I'd hoped that these creatures might also figure. It didn't take long, though, to realise that none of them was likely to remain still enough as to be observed and met at length. So – trees. Trees are very much in my consciousness; more particularly at the moment when the book I've been working on focuses on forest.

Trees love to be met, and encourage a kind of deep-time experience. And so, with various promptings from me, the participants meet and create relationship with one particular tree on 'our' land: the knobby oak shading the courtyard; the big holly intertwined with other species growing from an ancient Devon bank up by the holloway; a spindle; an ash; a sweet chestnut and a horse chestnut; bird cherries; and the apples, just now breaking into a foam of blossom. Then they write to and for 'their tree'.It's beautiful for me to gently stroll around and see people in various positions: back against, bare feet upon, arms around the various trees who had, they felt, chosen them; to feel the deep repose and quiet. (Yes, OK, tree-huggers. There are worse things.)

An hour, it appeared, was far too short to be in silent conversation with a tree. A day would be better. That's good to know, as I'm planning my TONGUES IN TREES course in Brittany this autumn right now.

And then we made our contribution of words via an interwoven long poem created from everyone's lines to the 'Earth Stories' evening of Transition Town Totnes celebration on Friday last; a moving and rich time of spoken words, poetry and story, songs of wild geese and salmon, offerings made to the fire-candle altar of writings on leaves, and a final very beautiful round of 4-part chanting on Chief Seattle's 'the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth'.

*

The courtyard's thick with birdsong. Over across the brook, hillsides blaze with gorse. The lanes now are almost at their cusp of fullness. We've the deep mauve of dog violet, periwinkle and early purple orchid; the ultraviolet of bluebells; dark pink and pale pink campion; white wild strawberry flowers, the stitchworts, Queen Anne's lace, jack-by-the-hedge and wild garlic in abundance; and of course the gold embroiderers: dandelion and buttercup, against the buttermilk of primroses.Since February wild garlic has loomed large in our cooking, accompanying the last of our leeks in various dishes, added to salads with our rocket, chopped into leek, potato and nettle soup. So here's a vegan sort-of pesto sauce for you:Take: 1 large handful of wild garlic leaves, washed wellHalf that amount of rocket1 handful of nettle tips, picked young, stripped from the stalk and wilted for 1-2 minutes in boiling waterWhizz up together with a generous gloop of olive oil and a couple of tablespoons of pine nuts.I added the juice from one lemon; or to tasteSeason If you can find it, 3 tbsps of Coyo – vegan yoghurt made from coconuts – completely transforms this.

3 comments:

A lovely post, Roselle – after the horror of your 630 miles. And then a full immersion in the wild world and your invaluable giving. So good to be able to picture it all having been to your place.I feel the same about trees and what you say reminded me of a longish prose-poem about the healing relationship between a paperbark maple (Acer Griseum) and a teenage girl I wrote a while back and always mean to bring to Iona. Maybe next year.I gaze at our trees here for ages in an almost trance-like state, wander amongst them, marvelling at the shining rippling effect which reminds me of the strait between Iona and Mull.This is a lovely way to start my writing-time, the memory of the singing bowl, the chattering of birds, sun thawing the ground-frost last night and so much warm wisdom. Thanks as ever – Miri (alerted to this blog by J who also loves it) xx

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I'm passionate about many things, but I'm increasingly realising that one way or another they're all about relationship: our interconnectedness, and finding ways to make conscious and wise our relationship to self and other (in which I include all species and the planet). Something to do with being earthstuff and starstuff both, all of us, and learning how to cherish. See my 2 websites, above.And 'qualia'? Well, loosely, the quality of individual subjective conscious experience; eg the perception of a colour, or experience of a journey; our experience of person-ness. (G defines it neatly: 'Qualia are what save us from being machines.') Sits nicely, in my imagination, with quanta. Quanta & qualia. Like bookends. Or pillars of the temple. Or cats – heaven forbid...

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I'm very happy for you to quote from these posts, but please credit me and provide a link to this site. All the text and images on this blog are copyright by myself or the credited poet/author unless it's something like an environmental charity circular. You'll need written permission from me to use whole articles, or my images. Thanks for your attention to this.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise – then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish.